Let's imagine that we added another company whose name was in all caps like AP.

So our word list would now look like this: In this case, the shorter word would take precedence and come first. This shorter name is identical to the start of the other company's name. Now, what if we had another company with a shorter name like App for example. If there are two identical words and one of them is capitalized then the capitalized word goes first in the alphabetical order like so:Īs we can see from the example above the company (Apple) comes before the fruit (apple) in any alphabetical list. Let's go over some examples to make this clearer. The primary rule in standard dictionary order is that capital letters come before lowercase letters. If you're looking for a quick method to alphabetize a list of words or lines of text online then check out my free tool for alphabetizing text. If you're in a hurry, I have a very short summary of the rules of alphabetical order that should answer a lot of your questions about the basic rules of alphabetizing. In this general overview, I'm going to try to talk about all the little minefields you might typically encounter when trying to figure out how to alphabetize words into a group of items or lines. The Rules of Alphabetical OrderĪside from knowing the basic ABC order of the alphabet, I'm going to talk about a few of the important rules you need to know. These are just general rules, some academic and news organizations may follow specific alphabetization styles that deviate from these rules so keep that in mind depending on your circumstances. I'm going to go over some general rules for alphabetizing in case you need to manually put a bunch of words in alphabetical order.

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